Okay. Kissinger brokered Middle East peace (even if it didn't last) and reopened relations between the US and China. I think that baseball might be within his realm of understanding.

Man, I really hate the Yankees.

Japan is full of geniusesOne page earlier in the same edition of the Post, we learn about Repliee Q1:

She's cute, nicely built and can process data like an MIT grad, but she still leaves something to be desired.

Meet Repliee Q1 — the most human-looking robot ever devised.

This amazing "female" android, created by Japanese scientists, has flexible skin as well as sensors and motors that allow her to turn and react just like a real woman. She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human — and even seems to breathe like a human[...]

[Her inventor comments] "Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."

At the moment the android can fool people into believing it's real for a very short period of time.

"However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that to perhaps 10 minutes," Ishiguru said.

Okay, here's what I don't get. The people who are designing machines like this are the very same people who watch movies like, oh, say, The Terminator (as well as the third in the series, which more closely documents what I'm getting at), The Matrix, and Stealth. Also, perhaps most importantly, they tend to watch TV shows like Battlestar Galactica (Trailer here). Allow me to give you IMDB's brief summary of that series, in case you don't want to sit through the trailer:

The Twelve Colonies of Kobol ("Heaven" in ancient Persian) long ago created the Cylons as machine worker drones for humanity. These machines became independent, after fighting in wars between the Colonies, rose in rebellion, created their own empire, and launched war on their masters. Forty years before the series takes place, a ceasefire was declared, the war ended and the Cylons all but disappeared. However, unknown to the Colonies, they had been evolving into more human form, becoming machine-created biological beings who seek to exterminate true biological humans. Following the nuclear destruction of the Colonies, the Cylons pursued the Galactica and its companion fleet, fearing that the surviving humans would someday return to take revenge on the Cylons.

That's right—it took these "Cylons" forty years to evolve themselves to a human form.

These Japanese scientists are working on giving them precisely the head start they would need.

So, my question is: if they're all a bunch of nerds who watch this kind of thing, why aren't they learning from it?!!